The present embodiments relate to methods for providing a management system for online communities, and more particularly, methods, systems, and computer programs for providing a management dashboard for managing online communities with large populations.
Online communities can range in size from a few dozen people to thousands of active participants. For example, some communities are directed to general consumers (e.g., product users). In these communities, also referred to herein as forums, users post questions and other users answer. In many cases, managers monitor user activity to avoid abuse or spam.
For a community to remain active and healthy, active management by one or several motivated members is often required. Managing these communities using existing approaches can be a challenge, especially for online communities in the thousands or tens of thousands of members. Having easily available metrics for activity and user impact can be extremely valuable to a community manager. Reducing the time and effort required to keep a community healthy will help ensure more online community engagement and more content creation.
One of the challenges for community managers is how to properly determine users who are contributing good content and are generally good experts, versus people that participate in the forums randomly, or that do not contribute good content, or that produce abusive content. Often, managers want to differentiate between a high quality user and a low quality user. This way, the online communities can provide quality content to users that do searches and recognize users that continue to produce good content.
It is in this context that embodiments arise.